It is curious that in the abundant literature produced in the greatest democracy of Greece there survives no statement of democratic political theory. All the Athenian political philosophers and publicists whose works we possess were in various degrees oligarchic in sympathy. The author of the pamphlet on the ‘Constitution of the Athenians’ preserved among Xenophon's works is bitterly hostile to democracy. Socrates, so far as we can trace his views from the works of Xenophon and Plato, was at least highly critical of democracy. Plato's views on the subject are too well known to need stating. Isocrates in his earlier years wrote panegyrics of Athens, but in his old age, when he wrote his more philosophical works, became increasingly embittered against the political régime of his native city. Aristotle is the most judicial in his attitude, and states the pros and cons, but his ideal was a widely based oligarchy. With the historians of Athens, the same bias is evident. Only Herodotus is a democrat, but his views have not carried much weight, partly because of his reputation for naïveté, and partly because his explicit evidence refers to a period before the full democracy had evolved. Thucydides is hostile: in one of the very few passages in which he reveals his personal views he expresses approval of a régime which disfranchised about two-thirds of the citizens, those who manned the fleet on which the survival of Athens depended. Xenophon was an ardent admirer of the Spartan régime.

At about 8 a.m. on Saturday, 16 July 1054, mass was being prepared in the church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The congregation was gathering; priests, deacons, and acolytes were assembled in the choir. Then, quite unexpectedly, three strangers—three Papal legates—entered the church. Passing through the nave, they made their way to the high altar, where they stopped to address the congregation in a few words of Latin or ill-spoken Greek. Turning, they placed upon the altar a strange document that one of them was carrying; then, in silence, they went back to the doors. Pausing in the narthex, they cried aloud the words: ‘Videat Deus et judicet!’—and with that they passed from the church. For a moment, there was confusion within. One of the subdeacons picked up the document and flung it to the ground; but then, as anger gave way to curiosity, it was recovered and carried to the patriarchal palace. Here, upon examination, it proved to be a bull of deposition and anathema directed against the Patriarch himself.

On Saturday, 4 December 1154, eight hundred years ago, Nicholas Breakspear was elected pope. On the following day he was enthroned and crowned at St Peter's, Rome. Adrian IV was the only ‘pontifex natione Anglicus’ who has assumed the tiara.

One of the arguments reported by Clarendon against the imposition of the English liturgy on the Scots ran as follows: ‘The kingdom of Scotland generally had long been jealous, that, by the king's continued absence from them, they should by degrees be reduced to be but as a province of England, and subject to their laws and government, which they could never submit to….’ Behind those words ‘the king's continued absence’ there lies concealed a series of ideas and assumptions which were so obvious in the seventeenth century that there was no need to elaborate or dwell upon them. For this very reason, it is possible that they have been overlooked in later periods, when conceptions of government and society had greatly altered. Yet phrases like ‘the king's presence’ had such vivid connotations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that to neglect them is to neglect important clues to the understanding of the social and political conduct of the men of the time.

The earliest literature on the massacre of St Bartholomew, we are told, was dominated by the attempt of Henry, the Duke of Anjou, to secure the throne of Poland. Henry needed the support of the Protestants in that country—then a more considerable body than they have ever been since; and, as he had been one of the chief culprits in the massacre, the Huguenots were determined that the world should know the magnitude of the crime. He secured his election in 1573, but, in the face of the storm which was raised against him, he was supposed to have been seized with remorse in Cracow, and to have made a confession to his doctor, Miron—a narrative which we shall have to notice later.

That the making of a law and the enforcement of it are two different things is a commonplace which is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the history of economic legislation. As a recent essay on ‘The Smugglers' Trade’ has shown, the point applied with special force to the sixteenth century when the government attempted on an unprecedented scale to control the economic life of the country, and especially the export and import of goods. The problem was twofold. In the first place the administration of the customs limped badly behind the rest of the financial administration. It was not until 1536 that nationally uniform rates were imposed, and at no time could the central government be sure of exercising effective control over the local customers and searchers and their deputies. While the royal lands were put under a modernized administration in the hands of such courts as those of General Surveyors and Augmentations, nothing was done either by Henry VII or by Thomas Cromwell to go to the root of the customs question. Cromwell, indeed, produced a comprehensive code with a preamble which showed that at least he knew what the trouble was; but somewhat in contrast to his usual practice, he did not approach the administrative problem at all. The customs were left in the exchequer from whose palsied hands the royal lands had been removed; consequently, when in an age of rising prices the value of the customs revenue began to outpace that of fixed land rents, the government of Elizabeth could do no better than farm a revenue which their own machinery was incapable of handling efficiently. Until the reign of Charles II, the English customs administration was never thoroughly reformed, and governments fell back either on the inefficient exchequer or on the dubious expedient of farming.

A Study of the historiography of the Revolution of 1688—the Revolution considered not only as an event in space and time but also in the minds of men—is long overdue. Although such a study would far transgress the decent limits of this paper, it is possible to isolate here a single phenomenon in the historiography of 1688; to examine the posthumous reputation of one of the central figures in that Revolution, to uncover the sources from which it rose, and assess the validity of the evidence upon which it is based.

In a book published twenty years ago, the present writer expressed the following opinion on the European wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: ‘It was not that the wars of that period meant less in expense and suffering than those of later times. Armies and navies were smaller, and even smaller in proportion to the number of the peoples; but they were as large as the poorer and simpler societies of those days could afford. In every great war there was some state that fought until it came within sight of revolution at home.’ The purpose of the present article is to consider, for the special case of the Nine Years War, whether this opinion may still be maintained or ought to be modified in the light of the many relevant publications of the intervening twenty years. The words quoted above relate to the social and economic aspects of the wars, but these, of course, cannot be entirely detached from the military aspects, and it will be well to begin by stating an assumption as to these military aspects. This assumption is that those who directed the fighting, whether on land or on sea, apart from such exceptions as the weaknesses of human nature must always occasion, fought to win and fought as hard as they could. For the present purpose this will be assumed, but it is not accepted as true by all historians. Some of them have applied to this period a famous sentence of Gibbon: ‘in War the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests’.

James I succeeded to the English throne not by act of parliament, not by election, not by the will of his predecessor, but by the will of God in making him an heir. The right by which he ruled was accordingly not less than divine. Further, partly by the circumstances of his succession but in greater measure by the tradition of English public law, he exercised his rule as the absolute king of a free monarchy. On this all Englishmen were agreed. They seem to have taken great pride in the fact that their king had no superior on earth. They shared, as his free subjects, in his greatness. At this time most Europeans did not belong to politically independent nations.

The military triumphs and the political eclipse of Marlborough epitomize much of the history of the Treaty of Utrecht. He was, as even Bolingbroke acknowledged, the great successor to William, keeping the Grand Alliance together and imparting to it a rapid and vigorous motion in sharp contrast to the delays of William's ‘languishing out disastrous campaigns’. As ‘the greatest general, and as the greatest minister, that our country or perhaps any other has produced’ (to quote Bolingbroke again), he was deeply involved in the prolonged negotiations leading to the peace. But Marlborough and the Whigs were discredited and ousted from office in the course of the negotiations, and the peace was the work of a Tory ministry which claimed that the terms showed a reaction from the impracticable proposals of the Whigs to the more sound, statesmanlike and feasible, concepts of William III.

In 1854 Russia for the first time was confronted with that doubtful privilege of national greatness, a single-handed war with a coalition of major European powers. When Nicholas I, ignoring the prudent advice of Nesselrode, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, had ordered his troops to occupy once again the Danubian Principalities, Turkey had resisted, England and France after some hesitation had come to her assistance, and Austria had been converted from a close ally into an unfriendly neutral.

In the voluminous historiography of international relations between 1871 and 1914, one of the thinnest patches is the middle 90's. Documents Diplomatiques Français had in 1939 not reached the years 1893–1900, and even now are filling this gap only slowly; the British archives for 1885–1902 were not opened until 1948; Russian material is slight. The consequent dependence of students upon Die Grosse Politik has had profound effects. French policy stands in especial need of re-examination; there is much interest in the early, vain attempts of French statesmen to end the baleful conflict with England. Mr A. J. P. Taylor has gone so far as to say that the Russian alliance was for France a means of achieving British friendship in more favourable conditions. The latest volume of French documents makes it possible to take this study further.

The strides made by the Russians into Central Asia between 1864 and 1869 were greater than any they took thereafter in that area. In 1865 they captured Tashkend. In 1866 they occupied Khojend and broke the power of the Khanate of Khokand. In 1867 they invaded the Khanate of Bokhara, and established fortified posts far to the south of the Jaxartes River; they also established the new Province of Turkestan, erecting it into a separate Viceroyalty with its capital at Tashkend. In 1868 they captured the city of Samarkand, capital of Bokhara, and made it clear that the Amir of Bokhara lived henceforth as a subservient client.

Chinese Tartary or Turkestan, or what has been since 1884 the ‘New Province’ of Sinkiang, is an irregular thousand-mile long tract in the heart of Asia, shut in on three sides by mountains and on the east by vast deserts. That it should still be in China's possession today, after a century in which so many of her outlying dependencies were shorn away, is one of the facts of modern history that it would have been most rash to predict.

The Portuguese had the honour of discovering and naming the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, but it was the Dutch who first settled there in 1652 and thus began the opening up of Africa from Capetown, still the most civilized centre in the continent. During the century and a half of rule by the Dutch East India Company, the Cape Colonists dispersed themselves thinly over an area about as great as that of the United Kingdom, and then saw their country annexed by the British. After having handed over the Cape to the Dutch Government, the British took it finally in 1806 rather than risk seeing it fall into the hands of Napoleon, who had so recently failed to hold Egypt, the other halfway house to the Indian Empire of his dreams. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colony gave birth to Natal, the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia. The Cape and its three earlier offshoots became a Dominion as the Union of South Africa in 1910 and, at the close of the Kaiser's War, obtained the mandate for South-West Africa. Southern Rhodesia, the Old Colony's youngest child, was subsequently given self-government.